


And Whither Then? I Cannot Say

by apple_pi



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-30
Updated: 2006-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-26 13:18:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7575436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apple_pi/pseuds/apple_pi





	And Whither Then? I Cannot Say

“She said yes!” 

Merry’s face was flushed pink with success, mouth stretched in a grin that was, even by Merry-standards, ridiculously happy. Pippin felt his own lips stretch to greet that happy grin, even as his stomach flip-flopped with a very different feeling. Then Merry was on him, arms tight as he lifted Pippin and spun him around, laughing the while.

“That’s marvelous,” Pippin gasped, unable to stop a strangled laugh. “Erk—Merry!”

Merry set him down. “What? Oh, Pip, I’m over the Moon!”

“And I’m delighted you decided to celebrate by breaking nine of my ribs,” Pippin said dryly. He rubbed his side and smiled at Merry. “I’m glad for you. She’ll make you a fine wife.”

“Certainly she knows me well enough to keep me out of trouble,” Merry said cheerfully over the buzz of early dinner guests arriving in the front hall. “C’mon, let’s go down the pub and celebrate!”

“What, you don’t want to finish off the bones in my torso for that?” But Pippin was still smiling, and still pushing away that other, flip-flopping, feeling, as he placed his pipe carefully in the stand and followed Merry from the small parlour. Anyway, perhaps a nip or three would make the whole thing… easier.

He didn’t think at all about why it should be so hard.

_TWO MONTHS LATER_

Pippin stayed back against the wall, smiling at those who greeted him and trying to avoid both the crowd and the miserable feeling in his belly as he watched his cousin stand beside Estella Bolger, the two of them held captive by a bevy of elderly aunts in a corner of the great hall. Pippin took a drink and watched, glad for the chance to see them together without being seen himself. Estella would, he conceded privately, make an excellent wife for Merry. She bent attentively toward Auntie Rosemary, smiling, her hand comfortable in Merry’s as he spoke to the Widow Tuckerby. Estella had the steady nature of her brother, as well as the (Tookish, Pippin thought with unconscious satisfaction) courage Freddy had displayed during the Disturbances.

He’d not seen her since the betrothal dinner, really—a glimpse here or there, a greeting and quick smile when Pippin happened to be at Brandy Hall, which was less often, of late, than had once been true. Merry, on the other hand, spent as many nights in his first home as he did at Crickhollow, and Pippin was growing rather accustomed to cooking for himself only, eating standing in the kitchen or with a napkin on his knee, seated before the fire with an unread book open before him.

Now he watched Merry lead her onto the floor and through a spritely circle dance; watched the way Merry placed his hand just right upon her back, and how he leaned in and then back to laugh at something she said when they came together with the movements of the round. She was steady and kind-hearted, and proud without being vain. She would make a fine matriarch of the Brandybuck clan, and living across the Brandywine would probably fulfill all her need of adventure; any unmet need for challenge would certainly be fulfilled by Meriadoc himself.

Pippin looked away blindly, lifting his glass to his lips.

He didn’t watch as the dance ended, but looked up at Estella’s greeting and Merry’s cheerful hail. Pippin’s smile felt mostly natural, and he reached for Estella’s hand, bowing over it with the courtly leg his dancing master had beaten into him many years before. “You look enchanting this evening,” he said.

Estella snatched her hand away from Pippin. “What in the name of all that is holy are you doing, Peregrin?” She leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek, smiling, dark and pretty and happy. “It’s too late to kiss my hand now, you know.”

“After a lifetime of pulling her pigtails,” Merry agreed, smiling beside her.

Pippin felt his own blank expression and covered it hastily with a lopsided (he could tell) grin. “You’re probably right,” he told them both. “Better to have a buss on the cheek, particularly since we’ll be cousins twice over, soon,” he added to Estella.

“Indeed we will,” she said. “And I’ve no doubt you’ll take full advantage of it, scoundrelly hobbit, and steal twice as much of my lemon cake as before.”

“I have no idea what you’re speaking of,” Pippin said loftily, to Merry’s vocal amusement.

“I’m sure,” Estella said, black eyes sparkling. “You and Merry will grow lovely and stout, as good hobbits should do, and finally stop looking as though you’re half-fed.”

“I’ll probably see Pippin more often than I do now, won’t I, Pip?” Merry asked, laughing. “And all due to your lemon cake,” and Pippin felt his stomach twist tighter than before, felt the pasted-on smile slipping like a mask with one string untied.

“Speaking of cooking and stoves,” he said, “I have to get back to, back to Crickhollow, Merry. I’ve just remembered something I forgot to do.”

“You can’t leave now,” Merry protested, “the dancing is just about to start again. There’s nothing that can’t wait.”

“No, I—I have to go. I’ll be back later,” Pippin stammered, backing away, turning his head toward the door and fresh air and easement of the vise constricting his ribs, “unless it gets too late, then I’ll see you, tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after—”

“Pip,” Merry said, but Pippin was pushing through the crowd round the door and into the almost-clear corridor and then out the grand front doors of Brandy Hall into the damp, cool night, gasping a little and still moving. Fleeing, and hoping neither Merry nor Estella had seen the pain that was making it so hard to breathe as he strode quickly across the fields toward his empty smial.

~*~

“Hello? Pip?”

Merry’s voice, and Pippin wondered if he could pretend to have fallen asleep, seated comfortable in the armchair by the fire.

“Your pipe’s still smoking, Pippin.”

Perhaps not.

“Hullo, Merry.” Pippin sat up and turned his head to look at his cousin, standing straight and calm by the door, hands clasped behind his back. “I was just drifting, I’m sorry.”

“You look quite busy,” Merry said, unclasping his hands and coming over to sit on the arm of Pippin’s chair. “Certainly busy enough to have left the Harvest feast and been rude to my betrothed.”

“I.” Pippin looked down, reaching to knock his pipe against the fender, trying not to twitch at how close Merry was, how quiet his voice sounded. “I was afraid I’d left the fire in the kitchen grate lit,” Pippin said.

“Hm.” Merry shifted; Pippin felt it more than saw it, and stayed hunched over, away from Merry.

“And then it was just nice and quiet here, so I thought I’d sit and have a smoke, and…” Pippin shrugged, staring into the fire. “What’re you doing here? You should be with Estella.” He was proud that it not come out bitter at all. Although he’d still not quite worked out why he should be bitter—he’d always known, always known that it would come to this, that Merry would leave him and travel on, travel past him. Past them.

“I agree,” Merry said, still in that dangerously subdued voice. “But Estella got it into her head that I should come here. In fact, she pushed me out the door and told me not to come back till you stopped looking like you’re losing the love of your life.”

“I don’t look like that,” Pippin protested. “I’m happy for you. And Estella,” he added. “I like her very much, even if she does have some mad idea about how I look.”

“Why don’t you look at me, and let me judge?” Merry asked.

Pippin glanced quickly at him and then back to the fire. “I’m fine,” he said, and nearly leapt out of his chair when Merry’s hand curved firmly round the back of his neck. 

Merry laughed, low and sweet.

“You startled me,” Pippin spluttered, shrugging his shoulders up, but Merry’s hand stayed where it was, and then Merry slid sideways and somehow suddenly he was sat in the chair with Pippin, _squashed_ in the chair with Pippin. “What’re you doing?” Pippin squeaked, belly tight, breath cut off. “Get off!” He struggled and pushed at Merry.

“Peregrin Took, be still and listen to me,” Merry said, squeezing Pippin’s nape and then letting it go; that hand slid down to rest on Pippin’s back, and strong fingers grasped at his chin—Merry’s other hand, turning Pippin’s face toward him. “Will you listen, you little fool?”

“I’m no littler than you,” Pippin choked, but he stopped trying to push Merry off him, settling instead for wrenching his chin from Merry’s grip. 

“True enough, and you’re a big enough fool for the both of us,” Merry snapped. “I’m marrying Estella, Pippin, not abandoning you.”

“I never said you were,” Pippin said, hunching further, trying to curl into a ball. A difficult maneuver, considering that Merry was practically in his lap.

“Your face said it,” Merry retorted. His fingers were pulling at Pippin’s chin again, inexorable, and Pippin’s breath hitched, he opened his mouth to deny it, but.

But Merry kissed his lips, cupped his cheek, murmured _hush_ into his open mouth. Silenced him, and in the lull Pippin could hear the soft sound of their kiss, of Merry’s word, of his own breathing: frantic as some small, panicked creature.

He sobbed, once, against Merry’s mouth, and then kissed him back.

After a moment the peace of it stole over him, the perfect clarity and warmth of Merry’s arms about him and the way their lips pressed together, the way Merry murmured “Hush now, hush,” as he kissed him. The perfect, fleeting familiarity of it.

Pippin lay his head on Merry’s shoulder and sighed. “I _am_ losing the love of my life,” he said, and it was ridiculous, the way his voice wobbled, so that he gave a small, hiccoughing laugh with it. “You can’t kiss me like that, Merry.” But he held on tightly, and felt Merry’s arms tighten as well.

“I bloody well can, and you aren’t losing anything,” Merry said. “Do you think...” He paused, and Pippin opened his eyes and blinked at Merry, looking at his face from this odd angle, waiting. “Do you think I could love you less, just because I love her?”

“No, but she—no one would understand,” Pippin said, so low it was almost a whisper, painful in his throat. “We’ve been lucky, and we’ve been indulged because of, of who we are, and all, but once you’re married...” He closed his eyes and kissed Merry’s neck, though he knew he shouldn’t. “Once you’re married you will be hers, and I can’t. You can’t... kiss me like that.”

Merry’s breathing was steady and quick. “She knows, you know.”

Pippin lifted his head at that. “I beg your pardon?”

Merry shrugs. “She knows. Just as Frodo knew, those years ago. Just as Berilac guessed, and Sam’s Rose. Probably others.”

“But how can she know, and, and,” Pippin waved one hand weakly, “send you here? Push you out the door, you said.”

“Because she’s a kind-hearted lass and neither blind nor stupid,” Merry said.

Pippin sat back and looked at him properly for the first time since he’d come in, and saw the strain of this conversation, of the last two months of Pippin’s silence and retreating, his sulky behaviour; beneath that Pippin saw truth, and happiness. Contentment in Merry’s face: held in abeyance, waiting.

“What does that mean?” Pippin asked.

“It means, my dear Peregrin, that Estella knows that I love you. Knows, in fact,” Merry breathed deeply, “every way that I love you, and for how very long I’ve loved you, and how very well.”

“Um.” Pippin felt quite spectacularly stupid. “...What does _that_ mean?”

“It means she doesn’t care, you twit. It means that she loves you because I do, and also because you pulled her pigtails when she was seven, and chased her around the orchard to try and put a worm down her neck when she was eleven, and carried her brother out of the Lockholes when she was thirty-four.” Merry kissed Pippin’s cheek, near the corner of his mouth. “She loves you because I love you and because of herself, just as you love her—you do, you know,” he said to forestall Pippin— “because you love me, and because of yourself.” His lips moved on Pippin’s skin, distracting.

“Merry,” Pippin said, and there weren’t any words for a little while, or no words needful of being recorded, anyway; small words, half words, comfort and tenderness and desire and sighs.

Later, when they lay curled together on the sofa, Pippin pushed his nose into Merry’s neck again. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said quietly. “You or Estella.”

“You would hurt me more by leaving me be, you know,” Merry said.

Pippin sighed, knowing, admitting, the truth of it by the way it rang true in his own breast. “I never can, anyhow.”

“Oh, Pip.” Merry’s arms tightened. “No more could I. Don’t you know that by now?”

“I’m learning it.” Pippin held Merry in return, close and tight, and then released him and sat up, rubbing his hands over his face. “We should go back.”

“We don’t have to,” Merry said, smiling up at him. He looked beautiful: tousled and content, the worry in his face smoothed away, contentment shining clear. 

Pippin touched his face. “We should, though. I owe Estella an apology.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Merry said, though he smiled. “And we both owe her thanks, I think.”

“We do,” Pippin said. He tugged gently at Merry’s ear, then released it. “I hope I’m as lucky as you, when I finally settle to settling.”

“There’s no hurry,” Merry said. He sat up and kissed Pippin. “Come along, then, I hardly had a chance at the puddings—they were still putting out crackers and cheese when Estella shoved me out.” They straightened their clothes, gathered their cloaks and pipes and stepped into the night a moment later, hands clasped tightly for a moment before Merry turned to lock the door behind them.

The fields were bare and damp, littered by broken stalks from the harvest being celebrated. “I hope we haven’t missed all the lemon cake,” Pippin said mournfully.

Merry laughed and grasped for his hand again, holding it tightly as they walked. “Estella told me she’d make you a whole one of your own, if only you’d ask.”

“You’re a lucky hobbit,” Pippin said.

Merry squeezed his hand. “I know.”


End file.
